If the last five years in higher education have taught us anything, it’s that disruption is no longer episodic; it’s continuous. Financial pressure, demographic shifts, changing public expectations, advances in artificial intelligence, and growing questions about the value of higher education are no longer distant threats but daily leadership realities.
We cannot predict exactly what higher education will look like in five or ten years. But we can predict this: that change will be constant, that ambiguity will be the norm, and that leaders will be asked to make high-stakes decisions with incomplete information and competing interests.
That future offers profound implications for leadership development. If we continue to prepare leaders only for today’s higher education landscape, we will leave them underprepared to lead our institutions into the future.
The future demands leaders who can think strategically and expansively, who can engage in anticipatory thinking, and who can navigate complexity without defaulting to fear, rigidity, or zero-sum thinking. Following are five skills that leadership programs should be teaching now.
1. Design Thinking: Encouraging “Possibility” Thinking
Design thinking is, at its core, a disciplined approach to problem-solving that prioritizes curiosity, empathy, experimentation, and learning. It emphasizes divergent thinking, generating many possibilities, before moving into convergent thinking, where choices are narrowed and decisions are made.
The sequencing of this approach matters. Our institutions are built on tradition, precedent, and deeply ingrained norms. These qualities bring stability and rigor, but they can also constrain imagination. Too often, leaders move to solutions too quickly, relying on familiar approaches because they feel safer or more defensible.
Design thinking encourages the exploration of what’s possible, creating a structured space for new ideas to emerge before decisions harden. It encourages leaders to ask different questions, surface assumptions, and explore multiple ways forward. This is especially important when problems are complex and ill-defined, which is increasingly the case in higher education today.
Teaching design thinking helps leaders to resist premature closure. It legitimizes exploration in environments that often reward certainty. And it builds institutional capacity for innovation without abandoning rigor or accountability.
2. “Both/and” Thinking: Moving Beyond Zero-Sum Leadership
Many institutions are facing sustained financial pressure, which naturally creates competition for declining resources. In this environment, leaders often default to a zero-sum mindset: If another division gains, mine must lose; if a new priority is funded, an existing one is threatened.
This response is understandable. Leaders must advocate for their areas and protect their people. However, zero-sum thinking narrows perspective and erodes trust. Leaders become focused on defending territory rather than on solving shared problems. Collaboration suffers, creativity declines, and institutional progress slows, often reinforcing the very constraints leaders are trying to escape.
“Both/and” thinking offers an alternative. It teaches leaders how to hold tension when competing needs are real and legitimate, rather than rushing to either-or conclusions. This is where novelty and creativity emerge.
Leadership programs should teach leaders how to approach high-stakes conversations, such as budgets, organizational structures, or emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, in ways that support positive-sum outcomes. This does not mean avoiding tradeoffs, it means expanding the range of options before narrowing them down.
The future will demand leaders who can advocate without entrenching, collaborate without capitulating, and pursue institutional outcomes without losing sight of local realities.
3. Creating Psychological Safety
The challenges facing higher education are too complex for any one leader or group to solve alone. Institutions will need the best thinking they can get. And yet, in too many places, people do not bring their full ideas, insights, or concerns to the table.
There are many reasons for this. Perhaps ideas were dismissed in the past. Perhaps leaders asked for input but never acted on it, or they never explained how it was used. Perhaps current power dynamics shape who feels safe speaking and who stays silent. Over time, people learn what is truly valued, regardless of what leaders say.
Psychological safety is not about comfort or consensus. It is about creating environments where people believe their ideas will be genuinely considered, where dissent is not punished, and where learning is prioritized over being the smartest person in the room.
Leadership development must help leaders to understand how their behaviors, especially in moments of stress or disagreement, shape whether people speak up or withdraw. Institutions that fail to cultivate psychological safety will struggle to surface the ideas they need most, precisely when the stakes are at their highest.
4. Making Decisions Without Defaulting to Consensus
Bold ideas are rarely born from consensus. And yet, in higher education, consensus often becomes the default decision-making model. Sometimes this is driven by shared governance norms. Sometimes it reflects a desire to avoid conflict. Or sometimes leaders simply lack alternative tools.
Consensus is valuable when it can be achieved, but it is also slow and often produces lowest-common-denominator outcomes. In a future that demands speed, clarity, and adaptation, leaders need additional approaches.
Leadership programs should help leaders to make decisions more effectively by teaching them how to distinguish between agreement and acceptance. Too often, leaders aim for everyone to be happy with a decision, when they should instead focus on transparency in the process. This includes clarifying upfront how decisions will be made, specifying who has input versus influence, and following through consistently.
This approach builds trust, alignment, and buy-in not because everyone agrees, but because people feel heard, respected, and they understand the rationale behind decisions. It also improves outcomes by ensuring that more ideas and risks are surfaced before commitments are made.
The future will require leaders who can balance inclusion and decisiveness in real time.
5. Planning in a World of Constant Change
Most institutions still take a traditional approach to strategic planning: the five-year strategic plan developed over six to twelve months. However, this approach assumes a level of stability that no longer exists. By the time many plans are finalized, the conditions they were designed for have already shifted.
This does not mean that planning is obsolete. It means that planning must evolve.
Leadership programs should be teaching approaches that emphasize scenario planning, real-time learning, and continuous planning cycles. Instead of convening task forces at the beginning of a planning process and disbanding them once the document is written, institutions need to keep leaders engaged through implementation, calibration, and course correction.
This approach allows institutions to be more dynamic and agile while simultaneously building leadership capacity. Leaders learn to think strategically not as a periodic exercise, but as an ongoing practice. They move beyond constantly surveilling threats and begin identifying opportunities embedded within change.
Developing Leaders for an Uncertain Future
We may not know exactly what the future holds. But we do know that the leaders we are developing today will be the ones navigating it. The real question is whether we are equipping them with the skills they will truly need, or whether we’re preparing them for a past that is no longer returning.
If these skills resonate, consider sharing this piece as a pre-read and engaging a cross-section of leaders in discussion. While the skills outlined in this article are likely relevant across much of higher education, each institution’s context will surface additional priorities. Depending on your sector and circumstances, you may identify other essential capacities such as political savviness, crisis management, courageous decision-making, or rebuilding trust and community.
In our two-day workshop focused on building internal leadership programs, we show institutions specific methods for convening these conversations and intentionally model the fourth skill described here, gathering broad input and wrestling with ideas without defaulting to consensus.
